


remain nameless

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Alucard is Not Okay, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, basically zero dialogue in chapter one, i needed to get some stuff off my chest, overuse of name symbolism, the understandable consequences of Alucard's situation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 01:18:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16483322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: Alucard repairs a castle and loses track of the days.





	remain nameless

**Author's Note:**

> .....well.
> 
> Remember how I said one time that asking me for stuff on Tumblr runs the risk of getting 4.5K of murder weapon about your favorite character? Yeah, this ask was for a happy ending. I would not blame that poor fool for unfollowing me for this, the product of an EXTREMELY emotional haze after finishing the season.

Adrian is restoring the castle.

Both castles, he supposes—he’s strong, and he has all the time in the world.  He pays for materials out of Dracula’s vault and does not seek help.  No one dares approach the strange and twisted castle above ground, and so below, like Belmont said.  Adrian has a shrewd suspicion, when he bothers to think about it, that the incinerated ruins of the Belmont manor grounds have been left untouched out of a fear that they might be cursed.

He's glad, in a grim and distant way, that he pushed Belmont and Sypha to leave.  This is…this is too raw, too aching, to have anyone near him while he faces what used to be his home.

Adrian starts with the bare minimum.  The doors of both castle and hold have to be repaired, to prevent the elements from doing the work of destruction in a matter of weeks.  He can’t restore the Enochian sigil on the trapdoor of the hold—he would need a magician for that, and for all that Adrian is a linguist and a polymath the likes of which most humans could never hope to match, his natural gift for magic is middling at best and largely untrained—but a large granite slab does almost as well.  He hefts it into place and fits it over the opening, seals it with wax so that it will hold out wind and rain while he deals with Dracula’s castle.

Adrian repairs the door of the castle.

Then he walks into the great library and stands in the middle of the room, looking at the wreck, for seven hours.

Some of the books knocked from their shelves have been put back in place.  He did that, the very next night after they took the castle and he killed—

It had been something mindless and small, familiar from a lifetime of loving the tidy order of alphabetized authors.  Adrian had picked up the books that had fallen with the great impact of his back hitting the shelves, when he was thrown into them, and slipped them back between their neighbors where they belonged.  Where the shelves were fragmented beyond use, he had stacked the books among the rubble on the floor, neat piles with the spines facing outward.  He had not bothered to move the broken glass or the splintered wood, nor done anything to deal with the scorched and melted hole in the wall.  Only the books. 

Adrian realizes, dimly, that the sun is setting through the window, the near-painful white light of day fading to something softer, less likely to make his eyes burn and his head ache.

Adrian leaves the library untouched.

Adrian— _Alucard_ , he tells himself, murmurs it under his breath when he’s working, whispers it until it loses all meaning, tries to carve it into his tongue and burn it into his blood like silver, like holy water, like a ward— _Alucard_ doesn’t have to hunt.  He needs blood, but Dracula’s stores do more than pay for repairs.  He drinks from the preserved supply of blood kept against a disaster, or a long period away from people, and eats from the food stores that remain untouched by the vampires who lived here.  Some, the fresh fruit and vegetables, are largely spoiled.  Most of the rest is fine.  There’s even flour, and yeast, if Alucard had it in himself to spend the effort on bread.

If anyone else were here, someone else who needed food, a human or two, maybe, he might try. 

Alucard does not make bread.

The library and much of the other areas ruined in the final battle—the observatory, the laboratory, the wing of living quarters—are too haunted for Alucard to bear.  He chooses the deeper reaches of the castle instead, where the work is simple and direct and miserably straight-forward.  He tears out bloodied carpeting in the entrance hall and pulls down the throne room almost entirely, excises the forgemasters’ workshops like a gangrenous limb, dismantles guest quarters and burns a bonfire behind the castle taller than he is, for days on end. 

He destroys the night creatures still caged in the castle and burns their bones, burns the beds used by Dracula’s allies and the tables used for their war councils, cracks open the Belmont Hold and burns the bodies there, burns bloodied carpet and broken wood.  Alucard considers burning the books he finds there that are too damaged to be legible, but he sets them aside to evaluate later.  Perhaps he can decipher what is left and transcribe them.  Perhaps Belmont knows what was inside.  Perhaps—

Alucard runs out of things to burn, eventually.   There was little to rebuild in the lower reaches of the castle in the first place, and now he has reduced what there was to empty rooms, a labyrinth of gutted dungeons and bare stone.  He scrubs the floor with his own hands and with telekinesis and with lye so pure it makes him retch until he cannot justify it anymore.  He retreats to the entrance hall, and then outside of the castle, where the ground is scarred and black from the bonfire, and sits down with his back to the castle and his knees pulled up to his chest.

It’s dark out—he’s been working night and day without much regard for what time it is.  He’s not sure how long it’s been since—since, but the air has gone cold and bitter rather than the sweet crisp bite of autumn he remembers from Gresit.  There’s snow on the ground.  He observes these things and forgets to allow them to affect him, because vampires, even half-human vampires, do not suffer from the cold the way a mortal would.  He sits behind Dracula’s castle—his castle, now, Alucard’s castle—in shirtsleeves and lets frost accumulate in his hair.

Alucard can’t sleep.  There’s irony there, he thinks, in his moments where things like irony and humor are achievable.  He slept for a year and was more than ready to sleep again, to escape this world that Dracula had made and sleep until he was found, until he was needed, until Gresit fell down and destroyed his vault and everything inside.  Whatever came first.

Now he can’t sleep at all.

Where would he sleep, anyway?  He’s avoided thinking about this question since he sat in his father’s study—in Dracula’s study and cried until he couldn’t anymore, curled up in the sturdy oak chair that he had hidden underneath as a child.  He had set some of the room to rights before he broke down, steadied the chair and set his mother’s portrait on the mantle, but he had fled as soon as he could trust his legs to carry him.  Once, his father’s— _Dracula_ , damn him, Dracula’s study had been a place of warmth and comfort.  It meant that his family was together, when there was a fire in the hearth and the soft sound of a quill tip writing, and Alucard had slept there often when he was restless as a boy.

He hasn’t been back to the study since he fled the ghosts that lingered there.  Nor the ruined library, where he used to creep after his mother put him to bed, so that he could read late into the night.  He hasn’t dared the observatory, nor her laboratory.  Dracula’s private library was in nearly as poor repair as the main one, with the distance mirror shattered on the floor, but even if it had been pristine, it made the scar on Alucard’s chest ache. 

His parents’ rooms, he didn’t enter even to check their condition.  His own—

And he couldn’t feel at ease closing his eyes in the lower reaches, where the burning taste of forgemaster magic lingered and his mind whispered dark warnings about the dangers that lurked in the corners.  Now, of course, he’s rendered them more or less unlivable for a vampire until the astringent, insistent reek of the lye airs out.

So.  Where does he sleep?

Alucard sits on the ground, back pressed to the wall of the castle behind him, and lets the question chase itself around in his mind until the sky lightens.  When he finally stirs, snow drifts from his shoulders and hair.

He holds his hand out, palm up, and watches flakes accumulate in his palm. They melt more slowly on his skin than on human skin—than on his mother’s.  She loved the snow, had taken him out on a balcony the first winter after he was born and cuddled him close, her warm cheek pressed to his and his hand, small and childish, wrapped around the end of her braid as they watched the snow fall on the mountains.

“Water is the only material in the world that naturally occurs as a solid, a liquid, and a gas, Adrian,” she had whispered, like she was sharing a secret.  “Here, _lupul mic_ , like this,” she said, and tipped her head back, sticking her tongue out.  Alucard had done the same, turning his face up toward the grey clouds overhead, and had laughed, stretching his hands up toward the sky as the cold flakes landed on his tongue.  His mother had laughed too, spinning the two of them around on the balcony until she was dizzy and he was clinging to her jacket, and then…

And then his father had come to find them, had found them sitting on the balcony with Alucard in his mother’s lap, both of them rumpled and flushed and grinning.  He had laughed, had crouched down to ask what they were doing, and his mother had caught the fearsome master vampire Vlad Dracula Tepes by the collar and dragged him down by main force to kiss him with her cold lips.  They had gone inside, finally, when his mother’s ears and fingertips were so cold she swore they had gone numb, and she had put a cup of warm spiced milk in Alucard’s hands to match her own and they had sipped at it while his father read to them beside the fire, and it had been so _good_ —

Something hot strikes Alucard’s skin, shocking, almost scalding.  He may not feel the cold like a mortal would, but his skin has grown chill, almost deathly so, and the water burns.  He raises his fingers to his face, presses his hand over his eyes as if to force the tears back, and a high, thin sound escapes through his teeth, like the whine of a wolf wounded by an arrow.  He feels a little like it, like there’s something barbed and terrible lodged in his chest that he’s been trying to outpace, and sitting here has finally let it dig through his bones to tear open a lung.  That’s what Alucard imagines this feels like—gasping airlessly while tears fall down his face, as if he’s drowning in his own lungs, grief filling the empty spaces like blood.

This is the third time Alucard has cried for his family. 

The first was when he returned to his mother’s home in a panic—he missed her by a matter of hours, because Alucard is too human to teleport any respectable distance and had to run home on foot when he heard rumors of a witch from Lupu.  He had paced through the ruins of his mother’s home, marking the rooms and doors in his mind to prove to himself that it had really been hers.  Here, his mother’s kitchen; here, his parents’ bedroom; here, his own room; here, her laboratory.  He had dashed the tears away without a thought and run, flat out, toward Targoviste, and arrived just in time to see his mother die.

Then he hadn’t allowed himself to shed another tear until Dracula was dead.

Now, crying _hurts_ , makes his ribs ache, makes his head spin.  Alucard closes a fist into his shirt, over the sharpest point of pain in his chest, where a child is calling hopelessly for his parents to come back to him, and lets his hair fall forward to hide his face.

Eventually, Alucard runs out of tears.  No one can cry forever.

Alucard wipes his eyes.  Alucard stands up.

There are still repairs to be done.

The hold is less damaged than the castle—Belmont killed most of the invaders in the first chamber, kept them from reaching the hold proper.  But the damage to the entrance shaft is extensive, the stairs smashed to kindling in places and ripped whole from their moorings in others.

Alucard solves the first and most obvious problem by the simple expedient of affixing a strong pulley to the top of the open column.  He can get himself in and out without trouble, but he’s not interested in testing the exact limits of his telekinesis in such a high-stakes manner as lowering heavy construction materials down a hundred foot shaft with him at the bottom. 

Then Alucard tries his hand at carpentry.

All things being equal, he’s not bad at it.  He dares the ghosts in the castle to find books in his mother’s study, her endless curiosity teaching him new things even now as he repairs the shattered staircase.  The stairs aren’t as fine as their predecessors, but they’re smooth and clean and sturdy, and he figures that the Belmonts would probably be all right with it.  Even if they wouldn’t—well, it’s his hold now, isn’t it?  If he decides that it needs pretty stairs, he’ll redo them.

The thought is equal parts encouraging and deeply terrifying.  Encouraging, because in the moments where Alucard is still, trying to close his eyes for a moment, he dreads finishing the restoration of the Belmont Hold.  When he finishes here, there will be nothing left but his family’s own wing of the castle, no excuse not to repair the library and the laboratory, nothing keeping him away from his parents’ chambers and the little room where he grew up and killed—

Terrifying, because for the first time in his life, Alucard looks forward at eternity and sees a long and lonely blank.  There is no one _here_.  Even if his mother had lived a human life and died of old age—unlikely, in Alucard’s opinion, Dracula would never have allowed it—he would have had company.  Family.  His _father_ , who loved him.  Now he has an empty, haunted castle, and the last legacy of a family wiped out of history.  If Alucard rebuilds the stairs of the Belmont Hold twenty times, at least it will be something to do to fill that endless time.

Alucard tries not to think about it too much.

When he finishes the stairs, Alucard turns to the rest of the hold.  He sets the painting of the Belmont ancestor back on the wall.  He pulls rubble out of the places where the walls are damaged.  He returns the books they pulled down in their frantic research back to their shelves, and begins trying to transcribe the ones that have been damaged.  He learns the index inside out, expands it.  He grins a little, for the first time in…a while, at the memory of Belmont’s affront over his criticism of it.

It’s been—months, probably, since Belmont and Sypha left.  Alucard isn’t sure.  It’s even harder to track time in the hold than in the depths of the castle.  He does know that he hasn’t talked to anyone in almost as long, except for a few passing exchanges with the merchants who sold him the stores of wood and stone that he needed.  He doesn’t talk much now, except for the occasional flood of cursing when something goes wrong in the repairs.  He doesn’t even murmur his own name anymore.  _Alucard_ comes easily now.

His mother would be so disappointed.

Alucard is restoring the Belmont Hold, and he is not thinking about his mother, or his father, or his eternity. 

He is _not_.

The hold is beautiful, and deep, and quiet, and kind—even to Alucard, who is trespassing on the legacy of those who might have hunted him, given the chance.  He sleeps a little more, here, an hour or two of restless dozing at a time snatched while he’s lying on the floor or the top of a shelf or on a table, filled with uneasy dreams.  He thinks he could be at peace here, if the world left him alone.

He understands, a little bit, the world Dracula craved.  The silence.  There is nothing that Alucard wants more than to close his eyes and sleep forever, and the hold, sometimes, seems like it would let him.

Alucard comes to the end of the restorations in the hold.  It takes longer than he’d first expected—he’s been doing makework, he can admit it, restitching old pages back into binding and moving books that have been misplaced back to their proper shelves just to draw it out—but not as long as he’d hoped.

The last step is the granite slab.  It’s the same size and weight as the previous one, as best as Alucard can estimate, and smooth on top, ready to be engraved with the Enochian seal.  Alucard has several diagrams of the seal, drawn from his memory and checked against what books he could find on the subject, and in theory, he should be able to engrave it and be done.

Alucard doesn’t engrave the seal.  He’s still not a magician, he tells himself.  If there’s another step he doesn’t know of, something left out of the books or lost over time, he could carve the seal and render the stone useless.  He’ll look into it later.

Besides, no one comes near the castle.  The hold is as protected as it’s likely to get.

Some part of Alucard wonders if he can find a way to contact Sypha.  She would know how to seal the hold.  Belmont might be with her—would he approve of Alucard’s repairs?  He’s the last of his line, it’s only right that he know what’s happened to his family’s hold.  Maybe the two of them—

Alucard breaks off the thought as crisply as snapping a neck, and leaves the granite slab over the entrance.

It is spring.  He knows this because the weeds taking over the ruin of Belmont Manor are green and lively, putting out flowers.  The sunlight is bright and cheerful, the air sweet with the promise of rain, warm enough that Alucard’s plain dress of shirt and breeches wouldn’t mark him as strange.  It’s…beautiful.

Alucard stands in front of the castle, hands spread and face tipped up to the sun, eyes closed to against the brilliance, for a long time.  He has always loved sunlight, even though it’s often too bright for his eyes, he remembers, and the memory is strange and a little foreign, as if remembering a story told to him by someone else a long time ago.  But it’s his, his own story, his own memory, and as he stands there in the sunlight, feeling the warmth sink into his bones like so little sinks into a vampire’s bones, it clicks back into place, a stone pressed back into a wall he’d thought was mostly torn down.

He is—so glad to be half human, Alucard thinks abruptly, as a breeze whips around him and vanishes into the ruins.  He would hate to have never felt sunlight on his face. 

The sun begins to set, and Alucard goes back into the castle.

It’s time to face the upper rooms.

Over the last uncertain number of months, Alucard has done more work than a team of humans could have achieved in years, but when he steps into the ruins of Dracula’s private library, the enormity of the work he has ahead of him hits him like a tidal wave.  It leaves him breathless—there’s so much to do here, even just in this room, which is less damaged than some.  He had thought that starting here might be easier, the way it was easier to tear apart the lower reaches, where there was more evidence of the monster Dracula than there was of Alucard’s father.

This room is ruined, but in the way of a room willfully wrecked by someone in a rage, or a haze of grief, rather than the collateral destruction the main library or the observatory faced.  The smashed distance mirror is far from the only thing scattered in pieces—books and quills, glass beakers and vials, even a writing desk, have all faced Dracula and failed to withstand his wrath.  The icosahedron that used to govern the castle’s movement is as shattered as the engine, planes melted together at odd angles and lying on the floor.  Alucard hasn’t even bothered to try and repair the engine yet, hasn’t even really decided if it’s worth repairing.  There’s nowhere he wants to go, after all.

Alucard lights the lamps and looks around the room, breathing slow and careful, as if inhaling too sharply might send his fragile control of himself spinning.  The shelves are mostly intact, at least, and he can probably repair the damaged ones easily enough.  The desk is a lost cause, he’ll have to build up a bonfire again.  Most of the books are more or less intact, and—

And there’s a spray of blood, smeared across the wall beside the door as if someone had tried to scrub it away while it was drying but hadn’t cleaned it properly.  It smells old, more than a year, and it has a distinct signature to it.  Unique, even.  Neither the sweet promise of human blood nor the electric crackle of vampire blood—somewhere in between.

Alucard retches, and it’s probably for the best that he hasn’t eaten anything more substantial than donated blood in a while.  There’s nothing to bring up. 

He locks Dracula’s library behind him.

It’s a bad start and sets a bad precedent for his progress.  These rooms are haunted, true, by the memory of better times, but Alucard drifts from one chamber to another like he’s the only ghost in this castle.  He remembers this feeling from that first day, a sort of perfect numb helplessness as he rights chairs and straightens pictures, lingering over them, but doesn’t move a finger to take steps toward real repairs.  He trails his fingers over his mother’s books, over Dracula’s telescope, over the door to his parents’ room.  He still hasn’t dared to go inside. 

Alucard passes through the halls of the castle with less impact than a strong breeze and—and he’s _tired_ , a sort of soul-deep exhaustion that drives him on instinct to the door he least wants to see.

At the end of all this, of Dracula’s war on the world, of history’s longest and most disastrous suicide, Alucard is a little boy alone in a vast castle, and all he wants is to sleep, and so here he is, sitting on his childhood bed without much memory of having walked there.

The room has suffered for the winter with a shattered window, but not as much as Alucard might have expected.  The eave, and the fact that the broken window is one of those set into the wall, have conspired to protect it from most of the elements.  The wallpaper is peeling, and many of the drawings tacked to the desk and wall have been shredded or suffered water damage, but the portrait of the three of them is unharmed, and other than the black and ashy stain on the carpet and the broken bedpost, there’s little else disturbed.

The ceiling is still painted with constellations—it’s full dark outside, probably even getting on toward morning a bit, but Alucard can still see them when he leans back to lie down on the bed.  He’s too tall for it now, lying at an angle with his legs bent at the knee and his feet on the floor.  His father had painted the stars for him, as a surprise for his first naming day, a mishmash of constellations that Alucard liked best arranged without concern for the reality of the night sky.

“If it’s the stars you wish to see,” Alucard says to the ceiling, remembering what his father said, “look out your window.”  _Art is for us_ , Dracula had murmured, and Alucard had rested his head against his father’s shoulder, so that he could better hear the rumble of the deep voice in his chest, like distant thunder.

It’s been some time since Alucard slept here regularly—first he stayed in Lupu, then he traveled, and then, of course, he fled to Gresit.  Still, though, the bed is made up with soft sheets and a warm blanket, the pillow placed as if he might come back to it at any moment, and it smells familiar and soothing, the smell that meant love and comfort for most of his life.

He is so tired, Alucard thinks as he stares up at the ceiling.  The painted stars swim before his eyes, the periphery feathered with grey, and focusing his vision makes a sharp, subtle pain lance through his temples.  He hasn’t slept well in so long.  Today was probably his least productive day in months, idled away in the sunlight and the night spent wandering the dark halls of the castle, but the exhaustion is hitting him hard and fast, like he’s been in free fall all this time repairing the castle and hold and now he’s finally reaching the bottom.

The thought comes to him like it’s being whispered by someone else—maybe he can sleep here.  Maybe, if he closes his eyes here, he can sleep until he wakes up _better_ , without the ache in his chest and the weight in his bones.  Maybe he can sleep until he wakes up to his mother’s face, his father’s affection.

Maybe he can sleep until he wakes up in a world where vampires don’t exist.

It’s a hopeless wish, but Alucard shuts his eyes anyway.

As the sky begins to turn grey, Adrian Tepes falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to cuss me out for this one, I am [on Tumblr](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/).


End file.
